I think I am close to finding my Chorlton Chartist.
Or in fact two, although having said that neither was born here or lived here, but one passed through in 1847 and the other one was born in Didsbury and lived just over the Mersey in Northenden.
Perhaps a little tenuous but a link and makes the point that we were not an isolated community but just four miles from the city and would have been alive to all that was going on. Our farmers and market gardeners visited Manchester to sell their farm produce, and in return we got the carriers who transported goods in and out of the township, the itinerant traders and plenty of Sunday visitors.
So all the news, the great debates and issues of the day that occupied the nation would work their way into the village and surrounding hamlets.
The fall of the Bastille, the cry of Liberty Fraternity and Equality, and the great surge of radical demands as well as the agitation for the protection of living standards as time got harder during the 19th century would have been heard here. And it was a soldier from Manchester walking into the township with friends who brought the message of Methodism. Added to there was the Duke’s Canal and the railway built in 1849 both of which made us even closer to all that was being done and said in Manchester.
The wealthy businessman Thomas Walker was just one such powerful voice. He lived at Barlow Hall and later Longford House was buried in the parish church and embraced the ideas of the French Revolution and the abolition of the slave trade. His life was threatened his home in Manchester attacked by a mob and he was put on trial for sedition*
All of which I have written about but today I want to introduce Alexander Somerville. He had been persuaded by Richard Cobden to join the Anti Corn Law League in August 1842 and travelled through the countryside arguing the case for free trade and an end to the Corn Laws.
In the June of 1847 he was here in Chorlton and recorded his conversations with local farmers, James Higginbotham, Thomas Holland, and Lydia Brown. He even came across a potato which went by the name “Radical” because it had been introduced by Joseph Johnson who had been active in radical politics.
Alexander Somerville while in the army had been flogged for his support of the Reform Bill in the May of 1832, was quoted by Frederick Engels in the
Condition of the Working Classes and his accounts of his travels through rural England were published in three volumes under the title Whistler at the Plough between 1852-53.
And there is much more. His autobiography published in 1848 gives a detailed account of the passing of the Reform Bill and life in the British army during that period. In one chilling passage set against the popular agitation against Parliament’s reluctance to pass the Bill he reported that
“It was rumoured that the Birmingham political union was to march to London that night; and that we were to stop it on the road. We had been daily and nightly booted and saddled, with ball and cartridge in each man’s possession, for three days, ready to mount and turn out at a moment’s notice.. But until this day we had rough sharpened no swords. The purpose of so roughening their edges was to make them inflict a ragged wound. Not since before the battle of Waterloo had the swords of the Greys undergone the same process.”**
In this very charged atmosphere Alexander and some of his compatriots debated the possibility that like the Yeomanry at Peterloo in the August of 1819 they would be ordered to
“draw swords or triggers on a deliberate public meeting.”
I cannot begin to appreciate the difficulty they were in or the momentums choices that were before them, and in a shining example of courage they stood out against a repeat of the massacre in St Peter’s Field, choosing to write letters
“to various parties in Birmingham and London... Some were addressed to the Duke of Wellington, some to the King, some to the War Office, and some were dropped in the streets ... [saying]
that while the Greys would do their duty if riots and outrages upon property were committed, they would not draw swords or triggers upon a deliberate public meeting or kill the people of Birmingham for attempting to leave their town with a petition to London.”
It is a powerful insight into a period which many history books pass over as
“popular unrest during the passing of the Reform Bill.” and leads on to Chartism
I rather think Alexander deserves more. He was after all flogged for his brave stand and went on to record much that was going on during the period, including a firsthand account of a British mercenary army unit that fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1839, and conditions in rural Ireland.
His is a story I knew so little about. I had read his History of the British Legion, and War in Spain but until Lawrence sent me a copy of the Manchester Examiner for June 1847 I did not know he had been in Chorlton or that he recorded so much of the story of radical politics.
So he was here, passing through I grant you, but if we have found him I travel in the full expectation that there will indeed be a home grown Chorlton Chartist just waiting to be discovered.
Tomorrow,
Joseph Johnson who had been active in radical politics. was on the platform in St Peter’s Field, during the Peterloo Massacre was imprisoned for “assembling with unlawful banners at an unlawful meeting for the purpose of inciting discontent” and ended his days just across the Mersey.
*
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/longford-hall-and-our-own-chorlton.html and
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Alternative%20histories
** Somerville Alexander, The Autobiography of a Working Man, 1850 page244 Google ed page 253
Pictures;
The Autobiography of a Working Man, Peterloo, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m01563, The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, April 10 1848, by William Kilburn
See also The Day I lost a Chorlton Chartist
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-day-i-lost-chorlton-chartist.html
